DONALD TRUMP: THE TRUE STORY OF HOW HE BECAME RICH
With an unprecedented economic rescue in the United States valued at 2.2 trillion dollars for companies, workers and health systems affected by the coronavirus, President Donald Trump has wanted to cover the clamor of an American society that demands more drastic measures against the pandemic, such as the declaration of a state of alarm. But Trump has always been like that, a man who has put money before everything else. And that's exactly how he built his fortune, which he estimates at $ 10 billion: with the business and the green of the dollar between his eyebrows.
Donald Trump, the tycoon, the real estate developer, the actor, the 45th president of the United States, flaunts his wealth whenever he can. "I am very rich," he has said more than once to his followers on his Twitter account, his favorite social network. He himself assures that his fortune exceeds ten billion dollars. Although this figure is most likely one of its many exaggerations: Forbes lowers the figure to a not inconsiderable $ 4.5 billion, Wealth-X fixes it at $ 4,400 and Bloomberg opts for a more conservative stance, 'only' $ 2,900 million. Dollars. For Trump, all these figures are nothing more than falsehoods ('fake news', his new two favorite words). And he also ensures that everything he has achieved in life has been achieved solely with his effort. The official version says that his father, legendary New York builder Fred Trump, gave him only a small financial boost early in his career. "I built what I built for myself," the current US president has said repeatedly. But it seems that they are also ‘fake news’. In Spanish, simple lies.
The reality, according to an investigation by The New York Times, is that Donald Trump would have received from his father's real estate network the equivalent of about 413 million current dollars. And the US newspaper points out that part of that money came to Donald Trump through dubious fiscal strategies in which the president himself participated during the 1990s.
In his books and in the countless television shows in which Trump has been in charge of enlarging his figure, the New York tycoon's speech has always been the same: the only financial help he got from his father when he began to build his empire was from one million dollars. "I had to pay him with interest," he always adds. He was, in Donald Trump's version, the one who turned his father's "tiny" real estate operation in Brooklyn and Queens into an empire that he himself values today at ten billion dollars. A whole conglomerate of hotels, skyscrapers, casinos and golf courses around the world that share the Trump surname.
That of Fred Trump, Donald's father, is one of those stories that cry out for a Saturday lunchtime telefilm to tell it with hair and signs. And, of course, it is not as tiny as your son points out.
The son of a German immigrant marriage, Frederick Christ Trump was born in 1905 in the New York neighborhood of the Bronx and from a young age he stood out for his good nose for business. He was not yet 17 when he started his own construction company. He did it with his mother Elizabeth as a partner because he was not yet of legal age to sign the checks. That was the beginning of his unstoppable success.
The company began building and selling houses for modest families in the New York borough of Queens in the 1920s and everything was going smoothly. But he did even better during World War II: at that time Fred Trump made a fortune building barracks and apartments with gardens for the US Navy and its soldiers in much of the US East Coast: Chester, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Norfolk ...
But the end of the war did not mean the end of his business, but rather its definitive takeoff. In the 30 years following the end of the contest, Fred Trump's company built dozens of large apartment complexes on the New York outskirts, especially in Brooklyn and Queens (Coney Island, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay, Flatbush, Brighton Beach, Flushing…). They were affordable houses for middle class families. And Trump knew how to take advantage of the increase in the federal budget earmarked for homes and the generous funding from the United States Government to build them: they were good buildings - many of them still standing - and Trump, used to skimping every last cent, he made them for less than the subsidy to pocket the excess money. The practice was legal, although those practices led him to testify before Congress in 1954. Ethically it was reprehensible, but legally it was faultless.
The business was round. And very onerous, which meant that at the end of his days (he died in 1999, at the age of 93), Fred Trump, the "Henry Ford of construction," had amassed a fortune close to 300 million dollars. And let him be known only for a worldly quirk: changing his navy blue Cadillac with FCT registration every three years exactly.
Forty-one years before his death in 1968, the fourth of Fred Trump's five children with Mary Anne MacLeod tiptoed into the family business. He was 22 years old and did so by joining the Trump Organization's board of directors. It took Donald Trump only six years to become president of the family business conglomerate, although Fred was the one still pulling the strings. And while the father held on to Brooklyn and Queens, his son set his eyes on Manhattan. "That decision was very good for me," said Donald Trump, "because my own father could have been my competition. In this way I had Manhattan all to myself.
That, in a way, turned the Trump Organization's way of working, which slowed down housing construction in Queens and Brooklyn to focus on building luxury towers in Manhattan. Donald Trump always boasts that this decision was exclusively his, but Gwenda Blair, author of the book The Trumps, rebuts him: "Most likely it was Fred who made the decision."
And where did Donald Trump get the money to undertake his mammoth projects if, as he says, his father's financial aid was only a million dollars? Blair also debunks that 'self-made man' image of the current US president: 'Donald Trump based his business on his father's financial resources. What's more, he needed Fred as guarantor for his loans and he used all of his father's connections to banking and politics to achieve his goals.
One of his early projects, while still in college, was the revitalization of the Swifton Village apartment complex in Cincinnati, Ohio, which his father had bought for $ 5.7 million in 1962. He sold them at a profit of a million dollars. But those middle-class dwellings did not fit his megalomaniac personality and he used all his energy to focus on New York City.
His first major project in the Big Apple was the bankrupt Hotel Commodore. It partnered with the Hyatt hotel chain to buy it in 1976 for a price that was never revealed and it became the Grand Hyatt hotel.
Taking advantage of his father's political connections and negotiating skills, Donald Trump convinced the mayor of New York City to cut taxes on the hotel for the next 40 years. The saving was 160 million euros. In 1996, ten years before the tax amnesty for the Grand Hyatt ended, Trump sold his half to the hotel organization for $ 142 million.
That wasn't his only hit. Using his own funds and the financial solvency of the Trump Organization, Donald Trump continued to invest in both the purchase and construction of large buildings in the Big Apple, such as the Plaza Hotel and the former Bank of Manhattan building.
The crown jewel of the Trump Organization is the Trump Tower, a 58-story building on Fifth Avenue that was completed in 1983. A building erected to the greater glory of its owner and also with the intention of revitalizing an ideal area for all real estate speculators. The luxury office and apartment skyscraper has been a magnet for businesses and curious tourists ever since. It houses the headquarters of the Trump Organization and on the upper floors the luxurious attic triplex of the Trump Tower in which he lived and worked and that the businessman had to change a little more than three years ago for the much more modest residence of the White House.
But not all of Trump's decisions were always correct. And there, to cover the pufos, as the investigation of The New York Times assures, he always found his father's financial muscle to cover him.
His debacle began in 1988, when he acquired the Taj Mahal Casino and went into debt beyond reason. The company stayed afloat, not without anxiety, but the following year when Trump built his third casino, also called Taj Mahal, he did so by financing himself through junk bonds. And it was the auction. Although he obtained additional loans to save himself and managed to postpone the payment of interest on the loans, the mounting debt forced him to suspend payments.
The banks and junk bond owners lost millions of dollars, but opted to let you restructure the debt to avoid losing more money in lawsuits. Of course, Trump had to give up 50 percent of the ownership in shares to the original owners of the bonds. It was the year 1991.
At the end of the 90s its financial situation improved thanks to the diversification of the business, with the construction of clubs, hotels and casinos. But while keeping his eyes and tentacles on Manhattan. In 2001, he completed the Trump World Tower, a 72-story residential building near the headquarters of the United Nations. Also, he began construction of Trump Place, a multi-unit real estate development along the Hudson River. And it also bought hundreds of thousands of square feet in Manhattan and took ownership of the Trump International Hotel and Tower, a 44-story mixed-use building on Columbus Circle. One cheap hit after another for a real estate shark used to the glare of spotlights.
And without leaving Manhattan, it expanded to other parts of the United States and abroad with real estate projects such as the Trump International Hotel and Tower (Honolulu, Hawaii), the Trump International Hotel and Tower (Chicago), the Trump International Hotel and Tower (Toronto , Canada), the Trump Tower (Tampa, Florida) or the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel & Tower (Panama City), the Trump International Tower & Hotel chain of hotels ...
In 2003, once again in financial trouble, Donald Trump began to engineer the sale of the empire that his father always dreamed would remain in the hands of the family. The sale, completed in 2004, brought him personally $ 177.3 million, about $ 236.2 million at today's exchange rate. But the banks, it turned out, valued the company at several hundred million more than the asking price. With which Trump sold his father's legacy cheap.
That Donald Trump, with his unforgivable style mistakes, is a real estate mogul is undeniable, but most of his wealth, his greatest source of income, comes precisely from his brand, his surname. A quality label that he began to build in the 1980s by licensing his surname to develop products of all kinds, be it hotels, clubs, hamburgers or perfumes.
What is your current fortune now that you are sitting in the overstuffed burgundy chair in the oval office and have had to leave the reins of the Trump Organization in the hands of your daughter and son-in-law? Nobody knows for sure. Possibly not the 10 billion dollars he claims. And surely not the 'only' 2,900 that Bloomberg points to, because the figure is growing day by day thanks to the daily revenues it obtains from its licenses. What is certain is that he owes a large part of his fortune to his father, who is also in the Oval Office. Fred Trump rests in a portrait just behind the chair his son occupies today. As it always has been.
